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5 Growth Steps to a Profitable Blog

5 Growth Steps to a Profitable Blog

You can earn money from your blog, but most people don’t because they go about things backward.

There is only one way to make your blog profitable, and that is to focus on one group of users and to solve their problems. People only buy if they like and love and trust you. Even if you help people, it takes time to build the trust necessary to make someone comfortable about opening his wallet.

Invest Your Time

Growing a blog takes a massive investment of your time. It’s a long-term project, just like planting an apple tree. It will bear fruit, but not in the first few years.

Blogs fail when the authors give up on them. That’s why you’ll find most blogs have been abandoned. (PsychCentral.com)

Unlike a fruit tree though, a blog needs you to spend time on it every week, and you can never stop adding new posts. Most blogs die quickly because their owners fail to appreciate the lengthy lead-in period before success slowly develops.

Your apple tree may have just two or three fruits in its third or fourth year, but by Year #12 there are hundreds. You will see slow growth in visitor numbers and subscribers at first, but if you persist growth will come in time.

Grow Your Knowledge

Your first three years’ blogging is an apprenticeship. You use that time to build your knowledge until nobody knows more than you about your subject. You become the king or queen of ‘growing new potatoes’ or ‘novel ways to use a screwdriver.’

Data is not information; information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom. Clifford Stoll

Knowledge is much more than information; it includes understanding the links between information packets as well as how that information can be applied.

Eventually, you have so much knowledge in your head that you can give away all the information you have without fear of empowering competitors. Your readers will have the information you share, but you are the only person with the understanding and total knowledge of your subject.

Grow Your Reputation

The object is to earn money from your blog and to do that you need people to *know* you are the top person in the niche.

You must share your knowledge freely and without asking for payment.

What,” Give away all I have learned?”

Yes. You only grow your reputation and credibility when others see you sharing that knowledge. When you share it, you are demonstrating your dominance because only someone with supreme confidence would give it all away. Your readers will never develop your in-depth understanding, so will never become competitors.

Get More Readers

Some users will become clients, but very few.

Once you have established your position in your market with a regularly updated blog, it is time to reach out to people who could use your services or products. Especially if you are selling to other businesses, you need to contact them rather than wait for them to realize they need you.

There are two parts to this; finding decision makers’ business emails and sending them cold emails where you ask permission to phone them.

● Finding Business Emails

You can spend hours searching the Web, LinkedIn, and Twitter, or you can use an application like Voilà Norbert

 

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VoilaNorbert is free and is very easy to use, and you get fifty business email addresses without even handing over your credit card details, so there is zero risk.

● Sending Cold Emails

See Also
Why You Should Try a Post Series For Your Blog

If customers don’t come to you, you must go to them, which means sending cold emails. This will get you many spam complaints that your email host will be unhappy about. Even if you have a traditional email management program and autoresponder, you will be banned for sending unsolicited emails.

MailShake is one SaaS solution whose business is to send cold emails.

Screenshot source

Using this app, you have full control of when your emails are sent so that you can block out weekends and Friday afternoons. You can also send follow-up emails to those who fail to respond to your first message within MailShake.

Solve More Users’ Problems

Cold emails can be the start of long and profitable business relationships.

Use your blog to find the problems and pains people have that you could solve. When individuals search Google for the solutions to their problems, your site will come up. Regular site visitors cannot help but be impressed by how much you know and that you are not afraid to share your knowledge freely.

Earn Money

You never know which of the contacts you make through your blog will give you paying work, but some will. And a few will send you a lot of work. You have no control over when this will happen, but if you keep on learning and growing your reputation by sharing that knowledge, it will happen.

Make it easy for people to buy from you by offering high-level coaching, one-to-ones, and e-books for a range of prices. Grow your email list and build loyalty in your subscribers by giving them exclusive access to you and the services you sell on your site.

The Short Version

It takes a while before any blog is profitable. Grow your knowledge until you are the boss and grow your reputation by writing extraordinary posts that solve niche problems every few days. Once you have a good number of authoritative posts, go looking for clients and send them cold emails using apps like VoilaNorbert and MailShake.

Keep writing and helping people to maintain your position in your niche. Build paying programs people can opt into starting at just a few dollars and going up to thousands of dollars for intensive personal access.

View Comments (2)
  • Nice !
    Growth also Depends on lead Generation so focus on lead generation is must and on lead generation tool. I have used few similar lead generation tool like AeroLeads, RainClutch, and Rapportive these helped me a lot in my business development campaign.

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